DARPA Announces Build-A-Rescue-Robot Competition

[Therumancer]

$2 million is that all. Its going to cost more than that to build the dam thing. DARPA need to make it $8 million plus to make it worth while for anyone in the commercial world.

Well, I think the idea is to try and get engineers that aren't in the commercial sector motivated, with this being a sort of "proof of concept" as much as anything.

A lot of the people attracted to this aren't going to be doing it for the money, as much as the recognition. What's more a lot of engineering and robotics students can frequently get free access to the tools anr resources of universities for their projects, which is why in similar situations you've seen submissions by classes of or teams of students rather than specific individuals.

It's really quite clever because for an offer of 2 million dollars, DARPA is probably going to wind up with the equivilent of billions being spent on looking into this. The guy, or team, who wins this is probably going to be able to write his/their own ticket for employment as an engineer in the robotics field.


That said, I welcome the advancement of technology, and rather than Skynet I sort of see a future where we might live alongside robots ala Asimov's writings... and this is coming from a hate filled, cynical, pessimist.

In Asimov's writings the last human society to use robots were hermaphroditic nutjobs who hated being seen by any other human. Not the greatest outcome.

Hmmm, quoted quite differantly from the message I got in my in-box. Just to be clear though I DID read the article, it says they wanted people in the field of robotics to work with those outside of it, as opposed to say expecting software engineers to master an entire field of engineering, they simply wanted input from outside the box. Of course you might have realized this and edited the article.

As far as Asimov's writings go, it's good to read someone who has read "Foundation". That said it should be noted that the group your talking about were entirely insane, however the robots themselves were not especially bad, just serving them. The original Robots, including Daneel Olivaw were actually still around despite having been forsaken, protecting and guiding humanity from within the shadows through the events of the series. While I do not agree with the eventual conclusions reached at the end of "Foundation" it should be noted that the Robots remained a friend of humanity up until the very end.

We could probably discuss that at length however, since it can get fairly complex. "Foundation" being one of the all time great science fiction series.